Justice as a Rationale for the Controllability Principle : A Study of Managers' Opinions

The controllability principle, which stipulates that managers should only be evaluated based on elements that they can control, has been widely studied in the management control literature, both from theoretical and empirical perspectives. It is based on the idea that managers are better satisfied because the neutralization of uncontrollable items in their performance assessment brings fairness into the evaluation. This paper focuses on managers' opinions concerning the relevancy of these neutralization processes, as regards three types of uncontrollable factors. It develops a conceptual framework to support hypotheses that managers wish the controllability principle to be applied and presents the results of a survey of 265 French managers. Both quantitative and qualitative results show a significant difference according to whether uncontrollable factors are external to the company or internal, offering new insights regarding the rationale for the controllability principle